Walter's Perspective: A Memoir of Fifty Years in Chicago TV News

Epilogue

172 Epilogue Which is a stunner. Not in a hundred years, in this profession driven by Madison Avenue and the dollars of commercial advertising, could I have guessed I’d get still another call from Channel 2 News. Or that I’d welcome it. I’m a happy member of the American Association of Retired Persons, remember—on weeknights, in the grandstand at Wrigley, or in Pilsen for tacos, reading politics in the newspapers instead of on prompter. It’s Jeff Kiernan again, news director calling about anchoring again. He’s thinking about teaming me up with Kurtis again, but this time full time, Monday through Friday on the six o’clock news. At seventy-two in a world of forty-twos and thirty-twos, I must not be hearing him right. That’s fantasy talk, two reporters our age (Bill’s now sixty-eight), wearing hair not salt-and-pepper anymore, but all salt, fitting into television’s youth brigade. There’s no way. CBS gambling two-year contracts on an anchor team of the past, noticeably older than any team in the market? Why is CBS going old versus the competition going young with anchors of more tender age? Here’s why—Channel 2 News is in the basement of the ratings, being ignored and suffering an identity crisis. Kiernan and his general manager, Bruno Cohen, need to attract attention (like the Cubs needing a trusty old-timer to stir the fans). Bill-and-Walter have done it before, maybe they can do it again, rev things up just enough to help the station into the game. There’s nothing for Kiernan and Cohen to lose in taking a chance, even a flyer. For Bill and me, like the one-nighter, why not? In retirement we talk often about how age and experience ought to be saleable commodities in the business of television news, and we’re being offered a chance to prove it. It’s hard to say “No.” Of course we’ll do it. On Monday, September 1, 2010, at 6 p.m., after rehearsing for one hour, we’re in the CBS studio, glassed-in on street level on the northeast corner of Washington and Dearborn, across the street from Pablo Picasso. On my chair . . . E P I L O G U E 173 are two pillows like the ones I used for so many years to persuade viewers we’re not Mutt and Jeff (Bill’s over six feet, I’m under five-seven). On the anchor desk, the scripts; in the air, expectations. After twenty years apart from each other, in different places in our lives, we’re still at ease doing a broadcast together. No hidden agendas or subtle rivalry. We admire and trust and genuinely like each other and are having a good time. In an extraordinarily competitive, often self-destructive business that chews up and spits out many more people than it cushions, Bill and I have a fanciful TV news relationship that shows and may work in a market that’s a place of neighbors. In Chicago, the familiarity factor counts, as does friendship, as does likeability (Bill) and some irritability (me). And the timing is good. Incessant change in management and direction, and too many musical chairs on the air, have mired WBBM-TV-CBS in hard times. To try a “Bill-and-Walter” show, it’s an appropriate season. The 2012 presidential campaign is underway, the Tea Party is threatening a national debt-ceiling disaster, the state of Illinois is $15 billion in the red, Chicago $635 million in the red. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is on the playing field with his new chiefs of police and the public schools, the crown jewels of local news, Cirque de Soleil of urban politics. Question is, what happens to Channel 2 going back on its way forward? How many ratings periods will the general manager and news director be granted to convince the supremes in New York to stay out of the way? How long in last place at six o’clock in Chicago before patience in Manhattan wears thin? A good bet is—not as long as it’ll take the Cubs to win a World Series, or even play into one. ...